Specialists from Travis helping to ID Pentagon dead

Northern California volunteers trained for mortuary duty have rushed to Delaware to aid in the somber and often gory task of identifying victims of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

The 58 military reservists, all from the Air Force, were not called into active duty. They responded to a call earlier in the week for mortuary specialists, climbing aboard a plane at Travis Air Force Base early yesterday.

They landed at Dover Air Force Base, which is handling the bodies from the Pentagon attack, late yesterday afternoon.

The group includes 32 men and women from the 349th Memorial Affairs Squadron, which is based out of Travis. The rest came from bases in Marysville and Washington state.

The reservists are not involved in mortuary work in civilian life but are volunteers from various occupations who are specially trained for the task.

"With citizen airmen, people don't have to work for a hospital to work in mortuary affairs," said Tech Sgt. Robin Jackson, a Travis spokeswoman. "When you come into the Air Force, you pick a job, and that's how they got into it."

The reservists train at the base monthly for mass-casualty situations such as a terrorist attack.

Volunteers and government officials from across the country have been arriving at Dover Air Force Base by the planeload since air restrictions were lifted. Officials said yesterday that 250 people are working at the mortuary --

including reservists, morticians and FBI investigators -- with the reservists from Travis, in Fairfield, still on the way.

On a normal day, the mortuary has five to 15 workers.

"We're really uniquely set up to handle a lot of casualties very, very quickly," said base spokesman Maj. Jon Anderson.

According to recent estimates, close to 200 may have died during Tuesday's attack on the Pentagon.

Anderson said bodies started coming in on Wednesday and would probably continue to arrive for the next few days. The bodies from the World Trade Center attacks will likely stay in New York, where a separate mortuary has been set up.

The Dover mortuary has been used in the aftermath of several high-profile mass killings, including the 1978 deaths of more than 900 Americans in Jonestown, Guyana.

More recently, the base handled the bodies from last year's terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, in which 17 men and women died.

While many of the bodies from the Pentagon have been arriving in pieces or unrecognizable states, the DNA of all military personnel has been on file for years. Anderson said with technology advances in the last five or 10 years, it's remarkably easy to identify remains.

"With the process of elimination, we should be able to identify the terrorists as well," Anderson said.

The Travis unit last served on a humanitarian assignment four months ago after the crash of a National Guard C-130 in Georgia, Jackson said.

The team's job is to create "a perfect uniform right down to the last medal, " as one base commander said recently. They help with the autopsy and embalming process, and also prepare the dead for interment.

The reservists heading to Delaware weren't the first group from Travis Air Force Base to help the relief efforts.

Earlier in the week, planes from the base transported search and rescue teams, medical personnel and computer equipment.